Thanks for reporting, and sorry about the issues.
Regarding the troubleshooting page, you could try to avoid the timeout by processing smaller chunks or allowing them to take more time: https://documentation.chattymango.com/documentation/tag-groups/for-developers-tag-groups/constants-2/
define( 'TAG_GROUPS_CHUNK_SIZE', 10 );
define( 'TAG_GROUPS_CHUNK_TIMEOUT', 20000 );
You could try smaller numbers for the chunk size and larger numbers for the timeout.
Otherwise, I have seen sites with more tags that didn’t run into these issues. Generally, the more items (tags, posts, etc.) you have on a site, the more powerful your server configuration needs to be, including the database server. Your hosting provider could check if there are any errors in the database logs.
The free plugin version doesn’t even access the post meta, so querying the term (tag) meta tables seems to cause the problem. These tables are part of the default WordPress installation and should be properly optimized.
I’ll keep on checking if there is anything that can be optimized in the code, but I’m afraid that scaling up your site would always eventually require to scale up also the database server (or its parameters). There is no hard breaking point, but it usually starts with performance issues.
Thanks- that seems to be helping the troubleshooting process, and maybe that will take care of it?
I’m only an advanced beginner in this backend stuff, so as I’m looking into optimizing the term meta tables, I’m now in over my head. I am, however, seeing this that looks very familiar to where I’m getting at when I’m troubleshooting:
https://zingmap.com/how-to-optimize-slow-queries-caused-by-filtering-many-meta_query-custom-fields-in-wordpress/
This may be completely out of scope, but again, I’m over my head. Is that something that fits into optimizing the code of the plugin or just something I should do on my own site? (I will try it!)
And yes, I’m looking into upgrading to a server, sadly 🙁
Thanks again- I really do appreciate your plugin! Would upgrading the plugin come with optimized code/faster rendering?
This plugin does not create other database queries than through the default WordPress functions, i.e. retrieving tags by tag meta etc. So there is no way how to change these queries since it’s all done by the WP code, and these functions should already be fully optimized. Adding a new index to the database table might help, but that is not something specific to this plugin and I don’t know any concrete solution.
Upgrading the plugin will not help here. The code for retrieving the tags is exactly the same and you might even run into the same performance problems with post tags.
I will keep an eye on performance for future optimizations but, unfortunately, for the moment I cannot see any place where to make improvements.
I have the same-ish problem – for past 3 months (since february as I recall) I kept getting Time-outs when working on posts, working with media files, frequent 500 and 503 errors in admin, AIO plugin was showing me warnings that REST API was unavailable when I was working with it.
Site Health check also showed REST API problems, finally I decided to find what caused it and through troubleshooting mode (switching to 2020 template, disabling and re-enabling plugins one by one) – it turned out that Tag Groups is the most reliable offender.
I’ve got screenshots and info from Query Monitor and REST API log plugins to share, if you’re interested.
@kuzzzma Thank you for reporting. Could you please send the screenshots and infos to chattymango (at) chattymango.com? Please also send some information about the number of tags and which taxonomies you activated in the Tag Groups settings.
@camthor
I will send you info today by e-mail, need to collect all the data,
